Lots of volatile components of unemployment but this continued rising trend is interesting

On wage growth, the ECI is back to 2018-9 rates of growth, but there's something funky going on with wages and salaries in Q1 that is pushing up annual unit labor costs. If it gets revised away, cost pressures are going to look more benign.

Good point. Market-based core PCE (excluding imputed prices like portfolio fees) coming in a lot closer to target recently.

A very different pattern than the quits data, which also proxies job-switching. No false signal after 2015 and still falling sharply.

New vacancies still coming down but above pre-covid. Actual hiring (JOLTS) already below pre-covid rate and still falling. Hard to reconcile with booming consumption, but a big dilemma: is this whiplash from over-hiring in 2023 or something more sinister?

Not great, certainly not terrible.

A few good months in the summer but overall not much improvement in inflation over the past 1-2 years.

One thing that was never clear to me: Cavallo et al. find lower price rises than the tariff, but that could be because the cost of the import is only a fraction of total costs (i.e. retailer stocking, staffing costs). So it could still be full passthrough to CPI accounting for its share of costs.

Cabinet picks over the course of the last week